Calendar

Jan
2
Wed
5th Annual Ann Arbor 50 First Jokes @ The Ark
Jan 2 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

Fifty comics from around Michigan, both veterans and upstarts, take turns telling the 1st joke they’ve written in 2018. Similar events, which began at the Bell House in Brooklyn more than a decade ago, now also take place in New Orleans and L.A.
8 p.m., The Ark, 316 S. Main. Tickets $10 in advance at the Michigan Union Ticket Office (muto.umich.edu) and theark.org, and at the door. To charge by phone, call 763-TKTS.

Jan
3
Thu
Laura Pershin Raynor and Lori Fithian: Drumming Up Stories @ AADL Downtown
Jan 3 @ 4:00 pm – 4:45 pm

AADL storyteller Laura Pershin Raynor and local drum teacher Lori Fithian lead a storytelling program with movement and music for kids in grades preK-3.
4-4:45 p.m., AADL Downtown Youth Story Corner, 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. 327-4200.

Jan
8
Tue
The Moth Storyslam: Backwards @ Greyline
Jan 8 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Jan. 8 & 15. Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit that also produces a weekly public radio show. Ten storytellers are selected at random to tell a 3-5 minute story–this month’s themes are “Backwards”(Jan. 8) & “Drive” (Jan. 15)–judged by a 3-person team recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Seating limited, so arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. General admission tickets $10 in advance only at themoth.org beginning a week before each event. 764-5118.

 

Jan
9
Wed
Sid Smith: Greg Grieco’s Canio’s Secret: A Memoir of Ethnicity, Electricity, and My Immigrant Grandfather’s Wisdom @ Literati
Jan 9 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Literati is honored to host Sid Smith who will be sharing her husband’s book Canio’s Secret: A Memoir of Ethnicity, Electricity, and my Immigrant Grandfather’s Wisdom about the life of his grandfather Canio Grieco

About Canio’s Secret:
In 1950s Chicago, a young boy hides in his bedroom closet to escape a father’s habitual rage. There he conjures up another paternal figure in his artistic Italian grandfather, Canio Grieco, his glimpse into happiness. With his wondrous tricks and stories of “Italy,” his library and drawings, his baseball and opera, Canio becomes the model of creativity for the lonely, introverted grandson.

Surviving through ingenuity and imagination, young Greg is fascinated by electricity and the world of men: he sticks his fingers in Christmas light sockets, finds unexpected mentors in a washing machine repair shop, fantasizes about the fate of missing fathers, and eventually betrays his grandfather at the billiard table.

Canio’s Secret is a coming-of-age story chronicling a boy’s poignant struggle to find consolation in his mother’s Catholicism and to break free of his father’s anger. Told through intimate portraits of parents and grandparents, nuns and janitors, friends and local characters, and their unsettling – often humorous – encounters, it is also the vibrant portrait of a multi-ethnic neighborhood soon to be scattered by white flight. And, as the older writer ponders his grandfather’s influence, the memoir becomes a meditation on Canio’s enigmatic advice, offered in the summer of 1953: “Happiness is all that’s required.”

Jan
10
Thu
Arthur Nusbaum: Starting from San Francisco: Thomas Rain Crowe in Conversation with Third Mind Books @ Nicola's Books
Jan 10 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Join us for a presentation by Arthur Nusbaum, Third Mind Books. He will be sharing his most recent book Starting from San Franciso: Thomas Rain Crowe in Conversation with Third Mind Books. He will be presenting poets that are featured in the book along with a live reading of their works.

About the Book

The seismic cultural impact of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs was followed by a series of aftershocks. “Starting from San Francisco ‘ measures a vital instance of this natural process, the circle of aspiring poets and publisher Thomas Rain Crowe and the resurrected Beatitude magazine in the 1970’s who used a small-press explosion to sustain and move beyond what their predecessors had inspired. the format here is interview and, with the commitment of on who was there and considerable sincerity, Crowe explores the dimensions of a flourishing literary excitement that deserves to be better known. the result is a singular history.” (John Tytell, author of “Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation.” [New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1976]). Based off Third Mind Books founder Arthur Nusbaum’s acclaimed presentation at the 2017 European Beat Studies Network Conference in Paris, France, this publication contains the full untold story of the Second San Francisco renaissance and the Baby beat Generation, which encompasses and exceeds the bird’s eye view revealed in Nusbaum’s expansive presentation. On August 4, 2018, Third Mind Books collaborated with The Beat Museum in San Francisco, holding a book launch and poetry reading for this publication, in which many of this epoch’s participants took part. The book was assembled by an editorial team including Nusbaum, his protege Joe Provenzano and Crowe himself. To quote the esteemed Beat-&-Beyond scholar (and our other blurb contributor) David Stephen Calonne, “For those who think that they already know all there is to know about Beat literary history, this book will provide many illuminating surprises.

About the Author(s)

Arthur S. Nusbaum is a long-time collector and independent scholar of the Beat Generation and its legacy, with special emphasis on the life and work of William S. Burroughs.

In 2010 Nusbaum founded Third Mind Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which aims to combine precision condition-grading and rigorous historical specificity in each listing; to truly “curate” every offering.

Thomas Rain Crowe was born in 1949 and is an internationally known poet, translator, editor, publisher, anthologist and recording artist and author of thirty books of original and translated works. During the 1970s he lived abroad in France, then returned to the U.S. to become editor of Beatitude magazine and press in San Francisco, and one of the “Baby Beats” where he was co-founder and Director of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival. In the 1980s, after returning to his boyhood home in North Carolina, he was a founding editor of Katuah Journal: A Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians and founded New Native Press. In 1994 he founded Fern Hill Records (a recording label devoted exclusively to the collaboration of poetry and music). Almost immediately, he formed his spoken-word and music band The Boatrockers, performing widely in the Southeast and producing two CDs.

In 1998 his book The Laugharne Poems, which was written at the Dylan Thomas Boat House in Laugharne, Wales, during the summers of 1993 and 1995 with the permission of the Welsh government, was published in Wales by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch. In the same year, his ground-breaking anthology of contemporary Celtic language poets, Writing The Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (The New Celtic Poetry), which includes poetry in Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Cornish and Manx was published in the U.S., and his first volume of translations of the poems of the 14th century Persian poet Hafiz, In Wineseller’s Street, was released. He has translated the work of Yvan Goll, Guillevic, Hugh-Alain Dal, Marc Ichall and Hafiz. In 2002 a second volume of his translations of Hafiz, Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved: 100 Poems of Hafiz, was published by Shambhala. For six years he was Editor-at-Large for the Asheville Poetry Review. His memoir in the style of Thoreau’s Walden based on four years of self-sufficient living in a wilderness environment in the woods of western North Carolina from 1979 to 1982, Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, was published by the University of Georgia Press in the spring of 2005. It is the winner of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association’s 2005 Ragan Old North State Award for Non-fiction as well as the Southern Environmental Law Center’s prestigious Reed Award for a best book of nonfiction on the environment.

He currently resides in the Tuckasegee community of Jackson County in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, where he writes features and columns on culture, community and the environment for the Smoky Mountain News. His literary archives have been purchased by and are collected at the Duke University Special Collections Library in Durham, North Carolina.

 

Jan
15
Tue
Meena Puri: Healing Your Relationship with Food – The Ayurveda Answer @ Crazy Wisdom
Jan 15 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Author Event – Healing Your Relationship with Food – The Ayurveda Answer with Meena Puri
Jan 15th 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. – There is no diet that will get to the real problem facing many Americans these days. The problem is less about the food and more about their relationship with food. How can we be in a better relationship with food? Meena Puri, Founder of the Ayurvedic Healing Centre, digs deep into this question in her new book, Healing Your Relationship with Food – The Ayurveda Answer.
I will be offering a book talk on my upcoming book; Healing Your Relationship With Food: The Ayurveda Answer and doing book signing.
For more information contact Meena Puri at (248) 202-0983 or email at: mpuri@ayurvedichealingcenter.com http://www.ayurvedichealingcenter.com
The Moth Storyslam: Drive @ Greyline
Jan 15 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Jan. 8 & 15. Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit that also produces a weekly public radio show. Ten storytellers are selected at random to tell a 3-5 minute story–this month’s themes are “Backwards”(Jan. 8) & “Drive” (Jan. 15)–judged by a 3-person team recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Seating limited, so arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. General admission tickets $10 in advance only at themoth.org beginning a week before each event. 764-5118.

 

Jan
17
Thu
Wieseneck Symposium: Hebrew Literature Today: Israeli and Global Perspectives @ Rackham Amphitheater
Jan 17 @ 1:30 pm – 7:45 pm

1:30-3:30 pm – Roundtable in Hebrew: Readings of texts and discussion with UM faculty and graduate students: Maya Barzilai, Yael Kenan, Nadav Linial, Marina Mayorski, Shachar Pinsker

4:00-5:30 pm – Panel in English: Discussion with the authors about shared themes and questions from U-M faculty and graduate students
Moderator: Maya Barizlai

5:30-6:30 pm – Reception with Authors

6:30-7:45 pm – Conversation with Authors: Maya Arad, Dory Manor, Ruby Namdar, and Moshe Sakal (in English. Books will be available for sale)
Moderator: Shachar Pinsker

The symposium brings four writers, who stand at the forefront of contemporary Hebrew literature in Israel and the US, in conversation with University of Michigan scholars and students. It features the highly acclaimed writers Maya Arad, Ruby Namdar, and Moshe Sakal, and the prize-winning poet, translator, and editor Dory Manor. Writers and scholars will discuss the meaning of writing Hebrew today in Israel and around the world, and the contacts between Hebrew and other languages. They will consider the challenges of translation, editing, and disseminating literature in a global context, as well as the political implications of Hebrew literature today.

The front entrance of Rackham, located on East Washington, is accessible by stairs and ramp. There are elevators on both the east and wends ends of the lobby. The assembly hall is on the fourth floor.
If you have a disability that requires an accommodation, contact the Judaic Studies office at judaicstudies@umich.edu or 734-763-9047.

Jan
21
Mon
EMU MLK Day Keynote Lecture: Keith Boykin @ EMU Student Center Auditorium
Jan 21 @ 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Talk by this CNN political commentator and bestselling writer, author of For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough, winner of the American Library Association Stonewall Award for Nonfiction in 2013.
2 p.m., EMU Student Center Auditorium, 900 Oakwood, Ypsilanti. Free. 487-1849.

MLK Day Lecture: Michael Eric Dyson @ Hatcher Library, Room 100
Jan 21 @ 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

This Georgetown University sociology professor and New York Times opinion writer–a Detroit native–discusses MLK and African American leadership in the 21st century.
2-4:30 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free. 764-7522.

lsa logoum logoU-M Privacy StatementAccessibility at U-M